CHI 2026 Honorable Mention Award for “The People’s Gaze”
St Andrews HCI Research Group are delighted to share that the full paper, “The People’s Gaze: Co-Designing and Refining Gaze Gestures with Users and Experts,” has received a Honorable Mention Award at CHI 2026, the ACM Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems. This recognition highlights the significance of the work within the CHI programme and reflects the strong contribution the paper makes to research on gaze-based interaction.
The paper explores how gaze gestures can be designed not only from a technical expert perspective, but also through a co-design and refinement process involving both users and domain experts to explore what obstacles stand in the way of ordinary people entering the gaze interaction. By grounding the development of gaze gestures in stakeholder input, the work aims to make gaze interaction more usable, learnable, and socially acceptable in real-world settings. The study offers both practical insights for designing gaze-based interaction techniques and broader contributions to the HCI community on how emerging interaction methods can be developed collaboratively.
The paper is authored by Yaxiong Lei, Xinya Gong, Shijing He, Yafei Wang, Mohamed Khamis, and Juan Ye. We are very pleased to see this work recognised at CHI 2026 and look forward to presenting it at the conference.
You can get more details via https://sachi.wp.st-andrews.ac.uk/2026/02/21/four-chi-2026-papers-accepted-from-our-research-team/, or through the arXiv version paper https://arxiv.org/abs/2603.05513